‘Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies’ was officially cancelled after one season by streaming service Paramount+ yesterday, along with a slew of other shows including ‘Star Trek: Prodigy’, ‘Queen of the Universe’ and ‘The Game’.
Even more brutal than the baffling cancellation, was the added gut punch that the show is going to be completely removed from Paramount+ within the next week. That means that the show will be pulled from the streamer less than a month after it aired its season, potentially now series, finale. What reason was given? Nothing officially but rumours suggest that it could be a result of both the ongoing writers’ strike and the merger between Paramount+ and Showtime.
Set in 1954 four years before the events of ‘Grease’, which was released in 1978 and starred John Travolta and Oliva Newton-John, ‘Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies’ set out to give the origin story of the iconic Pink Ladies. Jane Facciano (Marisa Davila), Olivia Valdovinos (Cheyenne Isabel Wells), Cynthia Zdunowski (Ari Notartomaso) and Nancy Nakagawa (Tricia Fukuhara), four outsiders at Rydell High, band together to fight back against the system that puts women in second place as men make the rules, with the determination to make changes to the way women are treated.
The 10-episode series created by Annabel Oakes, and based on ‘Grease’ by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, featured original music led by songwriter Justin Tranter, and it added some discourse around the treatment of women in the 50s. At its heart though, the show is about female friendship and the unbreakable bond that four women united in the same goal form. With plenty of nods to ‘Grease’, and even ‘Grease 2’, over the course of the first season, it’s clear that Oakes and her team have a loving affection for the franchise and season 2 promised to dive even deeper into how the ‘Grease’ universe is connected with the arrival of Frankie Zuko, presumably a relation to Danny Zuko in the original film.
Before the show even arrived on Paramount+, the trolls were out in force to claim the show was another example of ‘wokery’ that put a revisionist modern spin on the 1950s. What was the evidence for that? The trailer featuring two black characters and the T-Birds being Mexican rather than Italian in the original film. The first few episodes were released to selected press, and the reviews were less than glowing too, scarily echoing the sentiment of the trolls who had decided the show wasn’t worth watching before it was even released. Criticisms ranged from the songs not being memorable to the show presenting an alternate version of the 50s that isn’t grounded in reality.
It’s with trepidation that I started watching the show and imagine my surprise when I found that it was absolutely nothing like the reviews or trolls were saying. Was the first season of the show fault free? Of course it wasn’t, it’s a new show and as with any new show it takes time to find its feet and the audience needs time to get to know the characters. Show me an example of the first season of any show that doesn’t stumble here and there? Even those shows that have gone on to become classics such as ‘Friends’, ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and ‘Breaking Bad’ had rocky starts.
By 1954, in California at least, segregation had ended in schools so that criticism from the naysayers was way off base. The inclusion of characters like Wally (Maxwell Whittington-Cooper) and Hazel (Shanel Bailey) is actually authentic to the era, and had the trolls bothered to watch the show they would have seen how sensitively their storylines were handled and actually how the two characters explored the stereotypes and expectations placed upon people of colour.
As for the music, are you seriously telling me that people skipped out of the cinema the first time they saw ‘Grease’ and remembered every word to every song? No they didn’t. The music from ‘Grease’ took time to seep into music history, not to mention the huge marketing push that was behind classic songs such as ‘Hopelessly Devoted To You’ and ‘Summer Nights’ to get them into the charts. The original music of ‘Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies’ is superb with each of the four female leads impressing with their vocal abilities. The songs, of which there were 30 originals over the course of the series, varied in style and standouts included Marisa Davila’s ‘I Want More’, Ari Notartomaso’s ‘All In’ and Cheyenne Isabel Wells’ ‘I’m In Love’.
Perhaps the most baffling criticism levelled at ‘Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies’ is that its plot was too progressive for the time it was set. I’m a huge fan of the ‘Grease’ franchise but need I remind you that the original film was essentially about a girl who had to change everything about herself to impress a boy? That was the main gist of the story. What ‘Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies’ did is dive deeper into the reality for women in the 50s. If you think that women didn’t have struggles and that lesbians didn’t exist in the 50s, then I don’t know what to tell you. Just because those were never really explored in the original (aside from Rizzo’s song ‘There Are Worse Things I Could Do’ expertly delivered by Stockard Channing, which looked at how unfairly ‘promiscuous’ women were treated), it doesn’t mean those conversations and issues didn’t exist?
The show’s cancellation points to two things that we shouldn’t even need to discuss and highlight in 2023. Firstly, it seems that television executives still feel threatened by shows that tell stories of powerful, and empowered, women. With a central cast led by the excellent ensemble of Marisa Davila, Cheyenne Isabel Wells, Ari Notartomaso and Tricia Fukuhara, there’s no way that the show’s female audience isn’t relating to these stories and identifying parts of each character’s journey in their own lives. Secondly, the trend for networks to cancel shows that offer representation for non-white and non-heterosexual audiences highlights just how out of touch those at the top are. You only need to do a quick search on social media to see the outpouring of love that Notartomaso has received for their portrayal of Cynthia.
With so few shows on the air that cater to musical lovers and offer genuine escapism from the grind of everyday life, the loss of ‘Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies’ is a devastating blow. Paramount Television is shopping the show around in the bid to find another home, and I genuinely hope they manage to find one, but if they don’t the television landscape is going to look a little less bright in the months ahead. With the rate that streaming services, and even broadcast television, is dropping shows without giving them a fair chance it won’t be long before TV audiences don’t bother tuning in at all.
